A Dollar A Day!

Last night @pennsif surprised me with some great news! Our just starting community garden project has been selected for A Dollar A Day donation! And just in time!

Last few weeks were spent planning some irrigation, measuring and calculating costs. All the labor and expense are shared, of course. The current situation is this. We have a well (it's a drilled well, not one dug on hand with stone walls, etc) that's the sole source of water for the plots. However, that well is at one end of a group of plots and it's not practical to pump water from 20 meters deep over 100+ meters of pipes, it would require an expensive powerful pump.

Here's the plan and what we've achieved so far:

• Call a company to drill the well - done!
• Get a pump to take water out of the well - done!
• Store that water in 1000 liter tank - done!
• Run main pipe that spans the length of the entire group of plots and dig it in - done!
• Put outlets at strategic spots along the main pipe to allow different parts to be more easily watered - done!
• Get a small submersible pump to put in the water tank and supply the "mains" - done!
• Get a small gas generator, as there's no power on the plot and solar is absolutely out of financial bounds at the moment - done!

Of course the first three steps were done in previous years as they required a big investment that took some time to gather. The next few steps were done this spring. What follows is probably drip irrigation hoses at each outlets, secondary pipes, a timer, etc.

We'd also like to get another water tank for redundancy and to also be able to store more water at ambient temperature, as the underground water comes out super cold, as 10-12C at the best and that's not really OK for the plants.

And we'd like to make a structure to raise the both tanks at 3 m height and also shelter them, so we can run the drip lines by gravity and not by a pump that requires the generator.

That would require much more cash than we can scrape now, so those are long term plans... unless the SBD price shoots up :) For example the water tank alone would cost about 100 Euro. But who knows, if we're selected again for a future donation, things can move at a quicker pace!

The current donation will be used for another urgent project, however. This year we've got a heavy caterpillar infestation in the whole local area. Regularly, this wouldn't bother me so much for a full grown tree but the ones we planted with our last collected cash in autumn are baby saplings and it would be a pity to lose them all to caterpillars.

(source)

So we'll be getting a hobby backpack sprayer + some cold pressed extra virgin neem oil + some Castile soap. I have very positive experience with neem as insecticide in our garden (which, by the way, is turning more and more into a nursery for the community plot).

In fact, I had already ordered and paid for those items last week, in an effort to save the trees. So now those would be a gift to the group! This donation comes at a perfect time!

I'd like to end this update with a heartfelt thanks to @pennsif for the guidance he provided since my early days on Steemit as well as the trust he puts in our undertaking. Also a super-special shout goes out to Wren and Ini from @mountainjewel for their personal contribution and their inexhaustible supply of positivity!